Shape representation and recognition from curvature

An approach for describing objects for the purpose of recognition is developed. The authors deal with two key issues: building natural descriptions of curved objects, and making these descriptions compact and abstract. Typical examples of the types of curve one is able to describe as both qualitatively similar, yet discriminably different, are shown. Methods based on curvature extrema alone are likely to find three of the four of these shapes indistinguishable, while methods based on approaches such as shape templates may be oblivious to their similarity. The central ideas of the approach are outlined